


Flyt Club

by Jonaira



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies), Thor: Ragnarok - Fandom
Genre: Angst and Feels, Brotherly Bonding, Calm Before The Storm, Family Fluff, Family Shenanigans, Feel-good, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Heavy lies the crown but then space has no gravity!, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, IN SPACE!, Philosophy, Pillow Talk, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Psychology, Reminiscing, Shapeshifting, Spaceships, Thor: Ragnarok (2017) Mid-Credits Scene, Thor: Ragnarok (2017) Post-Credits Scene, kind of, thor ragnarok - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 05:10:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18684784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonaira/pseuds/Jonaira
Summary: "My my brother, I wouldn't show this to many people were I you." Loki gestured to Thor's list."It's not very reassuring to know that a pile of rocks is one of the top three things going for you when faced by oh," he squinted at the CONS (frowny face), "-death by starvation, death from capture by space pirates, death by ship engine failure, death by collision with asteroid belt, death by Hulk, death by loss of control induced lightning storm, death by Boredom."Loki looked back up at Thor."I sincerely hope this isn't in any order of importance. Because I'd put that last one much higher on the list than you have."In which Thor just wants to cry a little out of his one good eye, Ragnarok comes to pass with minimal flyting, and Loki puts the 'fun' into dysfunctional.





	Flyt Club

 

_Space, the final frontier._

Tony had tried to introduce him to Star Trek what felt like eons ago, but was actually just two earth years back, right before his homegrown homicidal bot crashed their party. Thor would have gladly swapped places with Jim Kirk right about now. Nothing that the crew of the S.S Enterprise had to deal with could compare to that which the crew of the Statesman had already been through, and were probably yet to go through.

  
The thing about travelling in deep space on a not-so-big-after-all spaceship with a largely recreation starved warrior race completely devoid of ale houses, but flush with numerous squalling babies, was that it made Thor too want to curl up and cry out of his one remaining eye (Oh, and there was that too.)  
But, manly tears not being something that heroes did nor newly crowned kings for that matter, on most days Thor sucked it up and did his best to be a good ruler.

An earth week into their epic space voyage to earth, he'd made a list (Jane used to like that a lot, making lists. The reminder still hurts, no matter what he told those fangirls about a mutual dumping. Ok _wow_  that sounded so wrong, even inside his head) of all the resources they had and those that they needed.

  
"A forced-to-be-recovering alcoholic Valkyrie, a hobo-chic ex-gatekeeper, a sentient pile of rocks (who in turn possesses a species of Odin-knows-what alien), a Hulk/Banner with breathtaking anger issues, a sneaky but well-meaning(??) mischief god of a brother, "  
Loki read out aloud over Thor's shoulder.

  
"How did you even get in ? I'd changed the room's passcode merely an hour ago !" Thor asked indignantly, while discreetly trying to cover up the burn he'd left on the rim of the holodesk by sparking in surprise at Loki's unexpected entry into what was supposed to be a secure room.

  
Loki just gave him a _Look_ in response. Which turned into a smirk when he saw the finger-shaped blackening on the edge of the desk.

  
"My my brother, I wouldn't show this to many people were I you." he said gesturing to the holographic list.

  
"Why even does 'hobo-chic' feature in your vernacular ? And it's not very reassuring to know that a pile of rocks is one of the top three things going for you when faced by oh," he squinted at the CONS (frowny face) side of the list, "death by starvation, death from capture by space pirates, death by ship engine failure, death by collision with asteroid belt, death by Hulk, death by loss of control induced lightning storm, death by Boredom."

  
Loki looked back up at Thor and raised an eyebrow. "I sincerely hope this isn't in any order of importance. Because I'd put that last one much higher on the list than you have."

  
"So are you here to relieve your boredom at my expense ? Because in that case I'll just add Death by Brother to the list since you won't be around long enough to cause it yourself." came Thor's muffled reply as he addressed the surface of the desk upon which he had taken to gently banging his head. The holo-list flickered cheerfully in time with his self abuse.

  
"Fraternicide." Loki sniffed. He looked contemplative for a moment before shrugging. "Take it from someone who's attempted patricide that it's still preferable to death by Sister. But considering that we effectively killed the goddess of death herself, this entire conversation is one big oxymoronic stew."

  
"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that Death, capitalized, can never be killed and will always dog our footsteps no matter how far or fast we run from it." said Thor, now thumping his head all the harder. His tenderized forehead suddenly encountered the yielding firmness of a palm instead of the desk. Loki had placed his hand between Thor's face and the hard surface.

  
"Our wise ruler has spoken." He said mockingly, except now Thor can see how the corners of Loki's mouth turn up in the slightest hint of hidden affection, can hear the fond undertone to the sharp words.

  
It made Thor wonder, had Loki's barbs always carried affection to soothe within their sting ? Had Thor been blind to see this before, or was this a more recent development which was the result of everything they had been through both together and individually in the last few years ? Funny how the loss of one eye opened the other.

  
"Moving beyond our dysfunctional family, now is not the time for indulging in self pity." Loki said cooly.  
It made Thor's chest tight to think that Loki and himself were all that was left of that family, dysfunctional or not. He chose not to voice that though and instead asked, "Do you mean to say there will be time later for self pity ?" Thor tried to match Loki's mocking tone, but it came out more tired than he anticipated.

  
"I mean to say that the remnants of an entire civilization mustn't suffer because their oaf of a leader finds himself confounded when faced with a problem that won't be solved by merely hitting it repeatedly."

  
Thor stood up and poked Loki in the chest.  
"If this is your idea of a pep talk, take it from me that your silver tongue has long since turned to base iron."

  
Loki's smile grew wicked.  
"Let's leave those kinds of speeches to your dear friend the spangly Patriot shall we ? In any case that's a conversation you'll be waiting many weeks for. But look at that, atleast you aren't moping around anymore."  
And true enough, Thor's newfound urge to intimately acquaint Loki's nose with his fist was preferable to drowning in the oily voices of the hundred little worries in the back of his head.

  
It unnerved him, how transparent he was to Loki. His confidence was the façade he wore in lieu of a crown in front of his people. But for all the screens of lies and deceit that Loki wove around himself, he knew falsity in another like a hound scented Bilgesnipe.  
"I'm waiting for you to come to the point of your visit." Thor said dryly.

  
"The point of my visit," said Loki as he crumpled gracefully onto Thor's bed, "is that this is not a visit. At least not anymore. I refuse to room with your friend the revolutionary pile of rocks anymore, I have igneous dust in extremely uncomfortable places and it is more fitting for the King's chief adviser to be close at hand."

  
"You're moving in ?" questioned Thor.

  
"I've _moved_ in." Loki tells him.

                                  ***

Another thing about Space. It was precisely just that. Space, with no division of day or night or any indication of time whatsoever. Thor reflected that it was much like what Darcy had once told him about casinos (in a misguided attempt to take him to Vegas) in that sense. He supposed Tony Stark would have been right on board with the idea of space travel.

To add to that, they haven't decided whether they're following Asgardian Standard Time since that's where they've come from, of Earth's Greenwich Mean Time since that's where they're heading. They don't have a sun or a moon or even their own constellations anymore with which to divide the day into and so far, it's been mostly disbelief and good intentions that have kept people in some semblance of self sustained order.

To deal with the non-existent division of time, and as well as to alleviate the overcrowding situation on the ship, Loki had suggested sleeping in shifts so that at any given time only half the populace was awake and milling about using up floorspace. Asgardians, having an inherent sense for following a chain of command had taken to it well enough.

 

Thinking about his 'work friends' made him ache a bit at the reminder that it would be a quite a while until he saw them again. And while he's at it, hurting inside like the Hulk was smashing his heart around within his thorax, he mourns for his fallen shield brothers as well.

Thor had learned of the deaths of the Warriors Three at the talons of Hella. Reality hadn't yet sunk in - There weren't enough rations to organize a classic Asgardian feast to remind him of Volstagg. The constant buzz, clamour and noise of an entire civilization wasn't conducive to remembrance of Hogun's preference for meaningful silence and quiet moments.

Valkyries' nightly conquests and the sounds of giggles and thumps from her room next to his and Loki's _did_ however remind him of Fandrall a bit though, so there's that. It didn't make him feel any better.

Of Sif and her fate there is no news. He can only hope she was off-world on a quest of her own and can figure a way out of there without the use of the bifrost. How would she ever find out where they're headed, would imagine if there were any survivors at all from the rocks in orbit that was all that remained of their planet though. He'll need to call in a favor from Loki then, get a message to her to come to Earth.

  
It's crippling sometimes, the little stabs of longing he feels for older, simpler times. Unbidden, he's reminded of the Captain. They'd called Rogers the man out of time back on earth, and he'd glimpsed the tired sort of sadness that sometimes flickered behind Steve's eyes. Thor thinks he understands Steve's wistfulness a little better now - the man no longer lived in the past, too pragmatic for that, but he still searched for it, seeking a lost time when things though not perfect atleast made sense, a time when he knew his place in the world.

When Thor mentioned his mourning of them to Loki, he'd received an expressionless mask and a measured, "They were _your_ friends Thor."   
Thor hadn't expected Loki to share his sentiment, but the frostiness of the reply still bites. Some small part of him is relieved that Loki was speaking freely enough and saying things exactly as he felt them, but then again, for a god of lies Loki had always wielded the truth as his sharpest blade. He mused on how much had to have been lost for Loki to finally speak plainly.

As the King, Thor had the privilege of having a room to himself on their packed vehicle as a luxury, until Loki had invited himself over as a chamber mate. He hadn't realized it at the moment, but a few hours later it had occurred to him that Loki's move, whether calculated to do so particularly or not made him look like a more considerate ruler, seeing as even he would forego the privilege of privacy and share living spaces just like the rest of his people.  
Loki had always played a deeper game. Thor is glad that for once, Loki seems to be on the same team as him.

                               ***

  
Still, on most days, Thor makes a great King, if does say so himself. Korg will back him up on this, and Meik will back up Korg. Like that time, for example, when he decided to use the ~~human~~ Asgardian resources available to him to ensure the comfort of the people and went to Heimdall about it.  
Heimdall had shot Thor a nasty glare. "That's not the kind of thing my gift of sight had been given for."  
"I just wanted to make sure she was comfortable and all, you know, be a good king, ensure the shower worked fine, enough hot water, that kind of thing," he trailed off semi-sheepishly.  
He's cut off by a knock to the back of his head.  
He's getting the hang of things though.

                                ***

It was something of a once-well-known-now-long-repressed fact that an upset Loki would often shapeshift into entirely another creature when he slumbered as a child.  
A young Thor would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding and reaching for a weapon, only to realize that the rumbling growl that had roused him were the rhythmic snores of some great beast (usually bearing an unnecessary amount of spikes and some garish shade of green. Loki had always been rather fond of pointy things) that lay curled up on the splintered remains of his brother's bed across their chambers.

It would happen on days when the other noble's children who trained with them had been giving Loki a particularly tough time, teasing and calling him weak or on occasions when a particularly taxing session of magic had left him frustrated and feeling inadequate. Of course, all of this had been gleaned by observation rather than by Loki telling Thor that outright (he had used his eyes when he'd had both of them). Thor had just never acknowledged these episodes and Loki had never mentioned them for sure. The next morning the bed would be repaired, gleaming in the morning light as good as new. The feather stuffing from the mattress would be back inside and not oozing from the gashes left in the mattress by great, jagged claws.

At one point of time, these occurrences took place nearly once an earth week. Dwindling over the years and the course of their adolescence, they stopped completely as far as he knew even before they moved into separate wings of the palace and no longer shared the same bed chamber. Looking back now, the episodes had stopped around the same time that they'd stopped truly _speaking_. Thor would talk, Loki would hear. He'd never noticed when his younger brother had stopped _listening_ to him, or rather, when he had stopped listening to Loki and speaking to him as more than somebody he just expected to fall in line with his (often harebrained) schemes and never challenge him.  
   
So the fourth sleep cycle after Loki had moved in with Thor, he returned to their quarters only to tense and reach for the hammer that no longer hung by his side when he found a giant wolf curled up fast asleep on the floor, with its head pillowed on the low double bed. Once he stopped the blind panic from clawing up his throat (was anyone hurt, how had the monster even got on board, was this Loki's idea of creature comforts?) and looked properly at the beast, a great many things made sense. For one, although it sure looked like Hella's pet mutt, this wolf wasn't Fenris.

  
Thor had been about to try and ensure that it never woke up with the help of a chokehold, when he was hit by the memories of their childhood. The creature twitched and jerked uneasily in its slumber, paws tucked tightly under it yet still sticking out over the edge of the mattress.

  
He stood frozen at the doorway, not sure if he was allowed to be privy to this form of Loki that had manifested when his guard was down.

  
In time the it takes for him to wish gloomily that Loki had turned into a nice, cuddly, _small_ snake that he could curl up asleep besides on the same bed as rather than the floor, the wolf cracked open a single green eye. His prankster of a brother didn’t need the bed as a pillow at all, and could have been comfortable taking up the floorspace only. Typical. (He should be bothered at this childishness. Instead, something warm and soft is spreading through him)

  
Though he lacked the facial features for it in his current form,Thor would swear Loki was raising an eyebrow at him. The great wolf yawned widely then, fearsome fangs on display. And then, he sort of shuffled his great head over a few centimeters on the bed, the frame creaking piteously.

  
The invitation was clear, even if that still left Thor with barely any space than before.  
Thor falls face first into the mass of thick black fur, earning a reproachful growl from Loki. His memories of the past were crystal clear about Loki would transform

involuntarily, and barely needed any jogging as such. But as Thor wiggled around trying to get comfortable again the warm hairy flank he rested against, he remembers fuzzily how as children, he’d move over to cuddle the monster on the next bed.

  
                                       ***

  
He woke up with a jolt in the darkness, still getting used to not rubbing his knuckle reflexively into his empty socket when that side of his field of vision remained dark. He was also in the middle of the bed, which wasn’t where he’d started out. When he blinked the sleep out of his eye, Loki, hulking and lupine was gazing at him fixedly.

  
“How come you haven’t changed back ?” he wondered out loud.

  
The wolf shrugged, a ripple of sleek dark fur rolling down its shoulders. Thor expected that to be all the answer he’d get so he flailed a bit when Loki’s disembodied voice sounded in his head.

  
“I’m not feeling like much of a person right now.”

  
It was stated matter-of-factly, and he didn’t have Loki’s human expressions to guide him (Not that they were particularly indicative of his true feelings most of the time) But something was definitely off.

  
“Strange,” he continued, “how one can still miss a world that never really felt like home.”

  
Thor shook his head. Not this again. “Asgard was as much your home as it was mine.”

  
The wolf shifted it’s head, gazing off to the side. “‘Asgard is not a place, it’s a people’,” Loki whispers in his mind, ever so slightly mocking.

“You’ve been talking in your sleep, you know. Its terrifically annoying. And the people of Asgard have always at best tolerated me, never completely accepting their second prince even though my true heritage was never revealed to them.”

 

Thor snorted. “Were you there on the bridge, at the battle of Hel, when the second son of Asgard delivered its people? You have to earn people's respect, brother, and you've more than earned your horns. You're a hero Loki. Yet you're the only one who doesn't believe that. ”

 

Now Loki snorts. "On the contrary, _I've_ always believed that. My disbelief is because for the first time, as you've pointed out, others believe it too."

"It's a reputation I can't claim to be all that comfortable with." He muses.

 

Thor chuckled. "Why, does it cramp your style? Curtail your mischief mongering ?"

 

The wolf bared it's fangs in a friendly grin. "I'm mischief incarnate brother, it cannot be separated from me any more than your thunder from you."

 

"It's the chaos you like," Thor teased.

He's surprised when Loki grows serious.

 

"Mischief- the noteworthy kind, mind you, - is about balance. Oh it certainly features chaos, oodles of the thing. But at the correct time, in the correct place and proportion.

 

"Restraint." 

 

And Thor listened.

For all his talk, the easy patter of words that fell from his lips, Loki had rarely _spoken_  as much as he had in the last few days.

 

The wolf huffed a breath. "Restraint," he repeated sounding tired, "was something Odin understood, even if I may not have seen eye to eye with the Allfather on practically everything else."

 

"Restraint, or rather her utter lack of it was what made him imprison our sister dearest. I suspect it's the echoes of this that he saw in you that made him panic and banish you to earth in the first place." Loki concluded.

 

 

 

"How long have you been keeping all this in ?" Thor asked him quietly.

 

The wolf chuckled, a fearsome grating sound.

 

"I'll admit, these last few years, though a mere blink of the eye in our life spans, have given me much to think about."

"But you voicing these musings of yours, to me of all people, is this you letting go of your restraint finally?"

 

The sheer bitterness in Loki's voice left a bad taste in Thor's mouth. "Only way to stay relevant anymore, isn't it ? Now that I'm so _predictable_. A god of mischief wouldn't be much appreciated right about now since the way things have been going, we appear to be the punchline of one great cosmic joke."

 

And there it was. The whole reason for this conversation. Loki was hurting and insecure.

"Did you believe everything I said to you, about our paths diverging, about you becoming predictable ?" Thor asked him gently.

 

"Did you believe me everytime I tried to kill you ?" Loki challenged. Thor didn't miss the way his mental voice wavered on _kill._

"Should I have ?" Thor smiled at him.

 

The wolf huffed and then rose to its full height, the bristling fur of its back grazing the ceiling. It stuck it's muzzle right in front of Thor, blinking at him momentarily before he started nudging Thor right off the bed with his nose, to drop him laughing in disbelief on the floor.

The wolf proceeded to flump down on top of him.

 

"Is this that hug you were supposed to give me ?" He wheezed, spitting fur.

 

"No," Loki sniffed as he strolled on two legs and sassy pants into the room, proceeding to crumple gracefully on the vacated bed. Loki gave him a _Look™_  

 

Thor panicked for moment, fearing his initial reaction to the wolf had been correct. But then, he wriggles his arms free from under the creature, and wraps them around its muzzle, gently scritching it's furry face. "I guess some questions never get answered do they ?" He tells the wolf.

The illusion of Loki on the bed flickered and disappears. The wolf licked him and then gagged comically.

"You've only yourself to thank for that," Thor told his brother sternly. "Hogging the wash chamber like you do."

 

Loki snickered, and then moved the worst of his bulk off Thor, who decompressed like one of Barton's fart cushions. 

 

And then he's being pulled to his feet by Loki's very human hand. Yet the eyes searching his face are those of the wolf.

"I was present at both the occasions when two kings of Asgard lost an eye, but gained foresight.

My life has been held dear by two of the most powerful gods I know, and not to blow my own trumpet, but they did go on to achieve greater things _after_ meeting me."

 

"I'm assuming you're coming to the point ?"

 

Loki grinned at him, sharp and open. "Maybe I will give you that hug afterall."

 

 

 

 


End file.
